Drowned Hopes Part 36

Still, something was wrong. As the woman cabdriver came out of the house carrying a big baking potato in her hand, Ken cracked the window beside him just far enough to make conversation possible, and announced through the crack, "Ngyou're gno gnipthy!"

Kelp reared back: "What?"

"Gnone of ngyou are gnipthyth!"

"He's a foreigner," Stan decided. "He doesn't talk English."

Ken glared at him. "Ngyou makin funna me?"

"What is that he talks?" Murch's Mom asked, holding the potato. "Polish?"

"Could be Lithuanian," Tiny said doubtfully.

Dortmunder turned to stare at him. "Lithuanian!"

"I had a Lithuanian cellmate once," Tiny explained. "He talked like-"

Ken had had enough. Pounding the steering wheel, "Ah'm sthpeakin Englisth!" he cried, through the open slit in the window.

Which did no good. Dortmunder said to Tiny, "Tell him it's our car, then. Talk to him in Lithuanian."

Tiny said, "I don't speak Lith-"

"Ikn's gnot your car!" Ken yelled. "Ikth's the bankth's car!"

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," Kelp said. "I understood that."

Dortmunder turned his frown toward Kelp: "You did?"

"He said, 'It's the bank's car.' "

"He did?"

"f.u.c.kin right!" Ken yelled.

Murch's Mom pointed the potato at him. "That was English," she said.

"He's a repo," Stan said.

"Ah'm a hawk!" Ken boasted.

"Yeah, a car hawk," Stan said.

Wally said, "Stan? What's going on?"

Stan explained, "He's a guy repossesses your car if you don't keep up the payments." Turning to Kelp, he said, "Andy, you stole a stolen car. This guy wants it for the bank."

Ken nodded fiercely enough to whack his forehead against the window. "Yeah! The bank!"

"Oh!" Kelp spread his hands, grinning at the repo man. "Why didn't you say so?"

Ken peered mistrustfully at him.

"No, really, fella," Kelp said, leaning close to the window, "no problem. Take it. We're done with it anyway."

Handing Doug the potato, Murch's Mom said, "I'll move my cab."

Handing Stan the potato, Doug said, "I'll move my pickup."

Handing Wally the potato, Stan said, "I'll move the van."

Wally pocketed the potato and smiled at the man in the Cadillac. He'd never seen a repo man before.

Ken, with deep suspicion, watched all the other vehicles get moved out of his way. Everybody smiled and nodded at him. The other woman and the mean-looking old guy came down off the porch to hang out with everybody else. The woman seemed okay, but the old guy suddenly said, "Kill him." His voice was thin and reedy, and his lips barely moved, but everybody heard him, all right. Including Ken.

The others all turned toward the old guy, and several of them said, "Huh?"

"Drag him out through the crack in the window," the old guy suggested. "Bury him in the back yard in a manila envelope. He knows about us."

Everybody blinked at that, but then Dortmunder said, "He knows what about us?"

The mean-looking old guy kind of shifted position and looked at various pieces of gravel, but he didn't have anything else to say. So the others all turned back to Ken with their big smiles on again.

Smiles that Ken mistrusted; none of this behavior was traditional. Lowering his window another fraction of an inch, he said, "Ngyou dough wanna argnue?"

Kelp grinned amiably at him. "Argue with a fluent guy like you? I wouldn't dare. Have a happy. Drive it in good health." Then he leaned closer, more confidentially, to say, "Listen; the brake's a little soft."

The other vehicles were all out of the way now, but people kept milling around back there. The van driver returned from moving his van to lean down by Ken's window and say, "You heading back to the city? What you do, take the Palisades. Forget the Tappan Zee."

Ken couldn't stand it. Trying hopelessly to regain some sense of control over his own destiny, he stared around, grabbed the tambourine, shoved it into the van driver's hand: "Here. This ain't the bank's," he said, the clearest sentence of his life.

The blond guy stood down by the sidewalk and gestured for Ken to back it up; he was going to guide him out to the street. Ken put the Cadillac in reverse again, and the woman from the porch came over to say, "You want a gla.s.s of water before you go?"

"Gno!" Ken screamed. "Gno! Just lemme outta here!"

They did, too. Three or four of them gave him useful hand signals while he backed out to the street, and then all nine of them stood in the street to wave good-bye; a thing that has never happened to a car hawk before.

Ken Warren had his Cadillac but, as he drove away, he just didn't look very happy about it. Much of the fun seemed to have gone out of the transaction for him.

FIFTY-EIGHT.

Two solid weeks of beautiful weather. Clear sunny days, low humidity, temperature in the seventies, air so brisk and clean you could read E PLURIBUS UNUM on a dime across the street. Clear cloudless nights, temperature in the fifties, the sky a great soft raven's breast, an immense bowl of octopus ink salted with a million hard white crystalline stars and garnished with a huge moon pulsing with white light. It was disgusting.

The problem was, to take the boat out on the reservoir, they needed darkness, clouds, no moon. They didn't need nights so bright you could read a newspaper in the back yard (Kelp did, which Dortmunder hated). They didn't need nights so bright that the local drive-in movie shut down because people couldn't see the screen. "In darkness deep the darkest deeds are done,/And villains all retreat before the sun," as the poet put it. Dortmunder didn't know that particular verse, but he would have agreed with it.

It was a big house, 46 Oak Street, but it had never expected to house nine people and a computer. Dortmunder and May occupied the master bedroom, upstairs front over the living room. Stan and Tiny shared the other front bedroom, Stan sleeping on the box spring and Tiny tossing uncomfortably on the mattress on the floor. Kelp and Wally and the computer filled the large bedroom at the rear, Wally being the one on this mattress on the floor (he didn't seem to mind), while Doug had been shoehorned into the last bedroom, with Tom. Since Tom would not divide his bed, Doug had brought up a sleeping bag; when it was open and occupied, the room was so full the door couldn't be opened. And, finally, the small utility room off the kitchen downstairs contained a cot which was Murch's Mom's portion. The three bathrooms-two up, one down-were fought over constantly.

Idle days in Dudson Center aren't exactly the same as idle days in Metropolis. Wally still had his computer, still could spend his days and nights battling unambiguous enemies in far-flung galaxies, but for the rest of them certain adjustments had to be made. Doug had a local girlfriend, whom he kept scrupulously away from the others (not even telling her he had a place to stay here in town), and with whom he spent as much of his free time as he could, and other than that he commuted four days a week to his Dive Shop, three hours each way, driving doggedly back to Dudson Center every night just in case the weather should break. Tiny traveled with him as far as New York about half the time, not liking to be for very long away from his own lady friend, J. C. Taylor.

Other than that, though, time hung heavy.

The regulars in the Shamrock Family Tavern on South Main Street were talking about the railroad. "I worked for the railroad," one unshaved retiree announced, "when it was the railroad. You know what I mean?"

"I know exactly what you mean," said the guy to his right. "New York Central. D&H. Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western. Those were railroads."

Down at the end of the bar, Dortmunder and Kelp drank beer.

"Union Station up in Albany," the first regular said, with a little catch in his voice, holding up his bourbon and Diet Pepsi. "Now, that was a beautiful station. That station was like a church."

"Grand Central Station," intoned his pal. "Crossroads of a million private lives."

"You know," said a third regular, joining the conversation, "some people confuse that line with the Naked City motto."

A fourth chimed in: "There are eight million stories in the naked city."

"Exactly," said the third.

"Let's get outta here," Dortmunder said.

Stan had brought home a dark blue Lincoln Atlantis, a huge old steamboat of a car, which he was "fixing up" in the driveway beside the house. Along about the third day, May came out onto the porch with her hands in a dish towel-she'd never done that before, was doing it unconsciously now-and looked with disapproval at what Stan, with help from Tiny, was wroughting. On newspapers spread on the lawn squatted any number of automobile parts, all of them caked with black oily grime. The Lincoln's huge hood had been removed from the car and now leaned against the chain-link fence like a t.i.tan's shield. The moth-eaten old backseat was out and lying on the gravel between the car and the street in plain sight of the entire neighborhood.

"Stan," May said, "I've got two phone calls already today."

Stan and Tiny lifted their heads out of the hoodless engine compartment. They were as grimy and oil-streaked as the auto parts. Stan asked, "Yeah?"

"About this car," May told him.

"Not for sale," Stan said.

"One, there's no papers," Tiny added.

Stan was about to dive back into his disa.s.sembled engine when May said, "Complaints about the car."

They looked at her in surprise. Stan said, "Complaints?"

"It's an eyesore. The neighbors think it detracts from the tone."

Tiny scratched his oily head with an oily hand. "Tone? Whadaya mean, tone?"

"The quality of the neighborhood," May told him.

"That's some quality," Stan said, getting a little miffed. "Down where I live in Brooklyn, I got two, three cars I'm working on at a time, I never get a complaint. All over the neighborhood, guys are working on their cars. And it's a terrific neighborhood. So what's the big deal?"

"Well, look around this neighborhood," May advised him, taking one hand out from under the dish towel to wave it generally about. "These people are neat, Stan, they're clean. That's the way they like it."

Gazing up and down the street, Stan said, "How do they fix their cars?"

"I think," May said carefully, "they take them to the garage for the mechanic to fix, when something goes wrong."

Appalled, Stan said, "They don't fix their own cars? And they complain about me?"

Tiny said, "May, I tell you what we'll do. On accounta the fence, we can't move the car around in the back, but we'll put everything in front of it, so you won't see all this mess and stuff from the street. Okay?"

"That would be wonderful, Tiny," May said.

Stan still couldn't get over it. "Hand your car to some stranger," he said, "then take it out, drive it sixty, sixty-five miles an hour. They got no more brains than that hood over there, and they're complaining about me."

"Come on, Stan," Tiny said, picking up auto parts from the lawn. "Help out."

Stan did so, muttering and griping all the time. Before going back into the house, May leaned out from the porch and looked up. Not a cloud in the sky.

Murch's Mom came stomping in to dinner late and bugged. "They don't fight back, dammit," she said, flinging herself into her chair.

They were seven tonight, crowded around the dining room table, all but Doug and Tiny, who'd be back up from the city later. Kelp looked over at Murch's Mom and said, "I thought that's what you liked about driving the cab up here."

"I'm losing my edge," she snarled. "I'm getting soft, I can feel it."

"I told you so," her son said.

She gave him a look. "Don't start with me, Stanley. And pa.s.s the white stuff. What is it?"

"Mashed potatoes," Dortmunder said, pa.s.sing it to her.

"Oh, yeah?" She looked at the creamy white mound in the oval bowl, then shrugged and spooned a couple plops of it onto her plate.

The cooking was being done by an ad hoc committee chaired by May, with Wally, Stan, and Tiny as primary committee members, and noncommittee members responsible for clean-up. The opening of packages was the princ.i.p.al culinary method. The result was acceptable, but no one was anxious to prolong the experience.

Tom broke a silence composed of munching and swallowing to say, "Anybody hear the weather report?"

"I did, in the cab," Murch's Mom told him. "It's gonna be fair forever."

"Aw, come on, Mom," Stan said.

"Extended forecast," his Mom said, implacable, "sun, moon, sun, moon, sun, moon, sun and moon. Pa.s.s the round green things."

"Peas," Dortmunder said, pa.s.sing her the bowl.

Murch's Mom rolled a bunch of peas onto her plate, then held them down with bits of mashed potato. "I met an old lady in the cab today," she said, "lives the next block over. I'm gonna go play canasta with her tonight. Not for money, just for fun."

She ate a pea-she couldn't get more than one of the little devils onto her fork at a time-then looked up at the silence and the surprised eyes. "Well?" she demanded.

Dortmunder cleared his throat. "Maybe the weather forecast's wrong," he said.